Social psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues showed how smoothly self-justification works to minimize any bad feelings we have as doers of harm and to maximize any righteous feelings we have as victims.4 They asked sixty-three people to provide autobiographical accounts of a “victim story,” when they had been angered or hurt by someone else, and a “perpetrator story,” a time when they had made someone else angry. They did not use the term perpetrator in its common criminal sense, to describe someone actually guilty of a crime or other wrongdoing, and in this section neither will we;
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